With the advent of intermediate moisture pet foods, it became possible to package palatable, moist, meat-containing products under aerobic conditions without the use of expensive hot-packaging or retorting procedures. These products, which generally have moisture contents intermediate those of dry and canned-type pet foods, have enjoyed considerable commercial success in the recent past. The present invention provides an improved product of this type, as well as a dual textured pet food containing a soft-moist portion and dry crunchy pieces.
While quite palatable because of their semi-moist character and the presence of meat, most intermediate-moisture pet foods suffer a penalty in texture over natural meat due to the need to finely chop or comminute the meat during processing. Some prior art products have attempted to overcome this problem by employing proteinaceous or other binders to gel the formulation into a more-resilient, less-plastic form. For example, see U.S. Pat. No. 3,380,832 to Bone. While this approach has been successful to some degree, the products produced in this manner are quite costly due to the added expense of the gellable binders. Moreover, these gelled structures still lack a fibrous, meat-like texture. It would, therefore, be desirable to have a soft pet food which more nearly resembles natural meat in texture and appearance. It would be especially desirable if this product could be made from either fresh meat or dried meat meal, without the need for employing a high cost gelling agent to obtain a resilient, meat-like character.
The cost advantage to the consumer by buying a soft-moist pet food instead of buying a high-quality canned-type dog food can be significant, but the cost penalty versus dry-type pet foods can also be significant. It would therefore be desirable to retain the soft-moist palatability advantage over dry, but at the same time, somehow, reduce the cost of the formulation.
It has been found that simply using a less expensive formulation does not maintain palatability at the desired high level. As an alternative, British Pat. No. 1,312,910 to Baker et al suggests making expanded pet foods having moisture contents below 10% by employing 10 to 50% of an organic solvent such as glycerol and propylene glycol; however, products having such low levels of moisture and requiring high levels of polyhydric alcohols to obtain a suitable, soft texture are lower in palatability and higher in cost than would be desirable. Therefore, there still remains a need for a way to provide a palatable soft-moist pet food using lower cost ingredients.
Moreover, conventional dry pet foods are not without advantages of their own, and it would be desirable to provide a pet food which retains these advantages while also having the advantages of soft-moist foods. The dry foods, because of their crunchy texture, satisfy the needs and desires of certain pets, especially dogs, to chew relatively hard, coarse materials. Such chewing action is essential for proper oral health, and if the desire to chew is not satisfied by virtue of the pet's diet, it will almost certainly be alleviated to some degree by chewing other, albeit more costly, objects which yield similar benefits. Moreover, the dry pet foods are quite economical as compared to the intermediate-moisture variety.
It would clearly by desirable to obtain the relative advantages of both dry and intermediate-moisture pet foods in a single ration. One obvious possibility would be to provide a combination food, having both dry and intermediate-moisture portions. A product of this type is suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 3,962,462; however, because of the differing moistures between the two portions, the moisture tends to migrate from the soft-moist portion into the dry portion causing the dry portion to lose its crunchiness. And, because the soft portion loses some of its moisture, it suffers textural deterioration and loses its moist eating quality. The disclosures of U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,916,029 and 3,922,353 suggest employing phases of different moisture contents but do not teach the preparation of a food having strong textural contrasts. In another approach to the problem, as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,883,672, 3,942,921 and 3,959,511, and U.S. B 478,759, a soft dry component is mixed with a hard dry component to obtain the textural contrast.
The use of conventionally prepared soft-moist products, such as those discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,202,514 to Burgess et al, with dry crunchy pieces has never been successful where strong textural contrast was desired. Conventional soft-moist products are highly susceptible to breakage and disintegration under ordinary conditions of shipping and handling when packaged with hard, dry pieces. Thus, conventional soft-moist pet food formulations are, as such, unsuitable for a commercially sound dual-texture product, espcially one targeted for sale at a price lower than soft-moist because of the increased material and packaging costs which would be necessary to control breakage and costs of product lost to breakage in delivery even where precautions are taken. The soft pieces must be structurally sound even when subjected to repeated impact by the hard, dry chunks. Thus, there is a present need for a highly-palatable, dual-textured pet food which exhibits the desired attributes of both soft-moist and dry pet foods and produces significant economies to the consumer as compared to high quality soft-moist pet foods, and while the art has endeavored to find such a product, it has fallen short in each attempt in one or more respects.